


Helmsmen are Decomposed and Absorbed by their Rigs after Death

by Wanderbird



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Body Horror, Casual ships, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, genfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-28 06:23:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11412096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wanderbird/pseuds/Wanderbird
Summary: So there's some backstory to this fic. I want to turn it into a series for which I have quite a bit of plot set up, but can't commit. They won the game as canon, yadda yadda yadda. Right? But it turns out the players messed up the game so much, broke so many rules, that now if the players enter the new universe, the universe will be instantly destroyed.  The end, no new game, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Instead of trying to stay and starve in the war-torn remains of the Alpha session, they send in the carapacians, consorts, and everyone who's not a player or a sprite to the new universe with WV and PM as rulers with instructions. Rose carefully sends herself into a seer fugue to locate a planet with no game that they can go live on, and the rest move out in teams to comb the session for living creatures to relocate, with Jade to take care of Rose and ferry everyone around. One such team is Karkat, Dave, and Kanaya, who are searching HIC's old ship for anything useful. Oneshot.





	Helmsmen are Decomposed and Absorbed by their Rigs after Death

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Body horror. Like seriously, that's kinda half the point for me in writing this thing, is to practice writing body horror and super vivid descriptions. Also, swearing is a thing.  
> I don't love the last part of this thing, it seems rather clunky? Idk, it has some important explanations for if I ever get around to continuing this, but it might be otherwise unnecessary? Eeurgh, decisions.

“…Fuck.” Dave leaned gently on Karkat’s shoulder. “So you’re literally saying… we can’t?”  
Rose smiled tensely, not a hint of pleasure in her face. “We can, technically, but if we do this wonderful new universe we created is destroyed.”  
“Then what was the FUCKING POINT?!?” Karkat yelled. “Why did we even end up playing this moronic, endlessly disappointing game in the first place if there would never have been any FUCKING reward, even if we won?”  
Jade shrugged. “I don’t think any of us had a choice in the first place. Wasn’t it only because of John and Roxy’s retcon shenanigans that we succeeded anyway? Otherwise this just would have been another long series of failed sessions, right?”  
John ran a hand through his hair. “I, uh, I think so. I mean I know we were stuck in a doomed timeline there, but I don’t know if this would have been a possibility for some alpha timeline somewhere or not? Yeah.”  
“However,” Rose continued, “as far as I understand, this consequence is only extended to the actual players of the game. Carapatians, clones, and any surviving original inhabitants could presumably enter without fear.”  
“So everything we did wasn’t quite for nothin’,” Roxy sighed. “It was just nothin’ for us. We still get to populate the planet, and all that, we just never get to enter it ourselves.”  
“Instead we get to wait away all of eternity in this war-torn, broken universe.” Kanaya’s voice was quiet. “Except for Karkat, Terezi, and maybe me and Gamzee, we’re all stuck here to live forever and repeatedly starve to death, because there’s no way we’ll be finding just or heroic deaths all alone, and who even knows how to kill a sprite?”  
Terezi shivered. “Great.”  
  
  
“…Uh, guys?” Dave’s voice was strained, for once.  
“Gog fucking damnit, this had better not be another screwed-up taxidermy of—SHIT” Karkat froze when he reached the doorway.  
“Is that… a troll?”  
Kanaya was there in a split second. As they watched, a fine bolt of purple arced from the bottom to the top of a great sucking mass in the center of the room. The remains of a troll clothed in soaked and dirty yellow twitched. His arms were distended and locked above his head, buried in tangled tubes of crackling slime. Pinkish tendrils pierced his helmet to bore into the pilot’s scalp, another larger tube jutting from the mound which enveloped his feet to disappear in the troll’s abdomen. Former troll’s abdomen. A similar pair of pipes invaded his upper back from above, coated with the shiny black ichor heaped around the joins, to unite with another which protruded, pulsating, into the hill of matter clinging to his torso from below.   
A hoarse whisper broke the silence. “Is that…” Kanaya swallowed. “Is that the Empress’s helmsman? Shouldn’t he, shouldn’t he be… long dead?”   
Dave felt a rough hand clutch his own. Karkat.   
“Kanaya,” the troll said, voice high-pitched and tense. “he looks like Sollux.”  
“I know.”  
“He looks just like Sollux, only deader.”  
“I know.” Kanaya’s face showed no emotion.  
“Helmsmen are decomposed and absorbed by their rigs after death.”  
“I know.”  
Something clicked in Dave’s head. Helmsmen are decomposed and absorbed—realization sunk in his stomach like fucking Jupiter in the ocean. Wait, no, bad metaphor. Realization sunk in his stomach like the ocean into fucking Jupiter.  
Panic entered more firmly into Karkat’s voice. “He, this, this helmsman, he—“  
“He’s alive.” Dave licked suddenly dry lips. “He’s alive, isn’t he?”  
Kanaya turned her head away. “Helmsmen don’t feel pain after being helmed, right? Isn’t that what we were all schoolfed?”  
“Sollux says that’s a bunch of utter bullshit. He said you have to be an active mental participant with psionics, you have to be able to feel everything that’s going on. He’s heard dying pilots and, and former pilots before.” Karkat tried and failed to rip his eyes away from the pulsing machine as it sent another arc of violet through its captive. This time, the living corpse gave a little guttural sound. “That’s why he was planning to run away with me just before Conscription Day, to avoid being helmed, not that it would ever have worked. Aradia was going to come too. She would’ve been doomed to the same fate, though probably on a smaller ship.”  
“I don’t think the Condesce was very kind to her tools.” Kanaya bit her lip. “None of us are psionicists, so we should be able to at least touch that stuff safely, right?”  
“I think so.”  
Dave twitched, sending a tremor through Karkat’s hand. “Touch it?”  
“We have to get that poor helmsman out!” Karkat glared. “Or do you think we’re just going to grubfucking leave him there?”  
“How?”  
“WHAT?”  
“How?” Dave reiterated. “It’s a serious question. Unless you wanna like, fry his brains or some shit. Fry them more. It looks like at least a few of those weird-as-balls cable things go into that gross-colored yellow helmet and he doesn’t look like he’s breathing. Most of those wires are literally going inside his body. And not that fucking cheater version of the word literally, either, I’m actually being literal here when I say those fucking cables appear to be inside his actual, literal body. Usually when that happens, it’s because they’re needed. We might want to be a bit more careful about ripping tubes out all over the place like it’s the independence day or shit like that, only with fewer aliens. Or possibly more aliens, given the circumstances. But seriously, unless you want this dude to just, like, keel over and die, you might not want to rip stuff out until you know what that shit’s doing. Just a thought.”  
Karkat stared. “Fuck.”  
Kanaya’s voice faltered. “If we had, if we had Sollux…”  
“Maybe. He always tried to stay as far as fucking possible from a helmsrig.”  
“Fuck.”  
The helmsman’s mouth gaped as if were trying to say something, broken teeth biting the air. He croaked a few times before managing a faint whisper, then arced as another bolt pierced his sternum. The two trolls hurried to the helmsman’s side, Dave staying as far behind as his arm would let him, still clutched in Karkat’s grip.   
The helmsman tried again. It was so FUCKING difficult, behind the sensors and cameras, thousands of automated procedures screaming through his head. Behind the automatic reinforcement that pilots do not speak through their mouths, they speak through their actions. Their obedience. It took what felt like ridiculously long, but was probably only a second or two in real time, to convince himself to try again, brave the spark and burn of electricity which would surely follow, a lance of searing pain across his spine. “Sign… less….” He muttered, managing a bit of voice instead of breath alone. The helmsman always forgot how long it took to move this broken heap of flesh, entire seconds, even. The reminder he set to himself popped up again. Right. The young trolls. The one with, the one with, the hair, and the sign, he was, he was important, he was signless, but he had a sign, it was there on his, on his shirt, that didn’t make any sense—the punishment crackled through him with a screaming stench of smoke, but the only reaction the helmsman gave was a gasping gurgle. At least the pain did something to clear his head. That one, the short one, was him. Signless, dead, him, the helmsman thought with frustration. Who? Beloved, yes, but who? And the other one, with the glowing skin his cameras identified immediately as a rainbow drinker, the short hair, the jade green, the eyes, her, she was important too. For some reason, the word mother, origin, came to mind. What did that have to do with it? An origin was not a concept that could be applied to a troll. But someone, somewhere, someone had. Him? No, no. Someone. And with these two, there was another, they were supposed to be a set of four. Four? Two more then, but there was only one other that he could remember. Her, the wild one, the deaf one, important, alive once. When he last saw her. The helmsman began a methodical search almost instantaneously, but he could not find her, she was not among the visitors to his body, his vile red body defiled with the symbols of the Condesce. Time ticked away.   
A clawed hand on his shoulder lurched the helmsman back to that sack of twitching meat. He whimpered involuntarily, dry throat flexing around its constant invader. Her, the Condesce, the hated Condesce, was back, she must be back, and she would extend his torment—no, he soothed. No, it was him, the juvenile, the signless, whoever that was, lips peeled in distaste.   
“It’s, it’ll be okay, Mituna. We’ll get you out of there. We just can’t yet, you see? We don’t know how.”  
It took a moment for the helmsman to understand his words. Mituna? Who was Mituna? The helmsman didn’t recognize the name at all. He ran a search for it almost unconsciously, but the results it gave were blocked. What? Why? Nothing was blocked from him, he was the computer doing do the blocking. The green troll put a hand on the other’s back, pulling him away from the helmsman as she cast frightened eyes up at the roiling mass that was the helmsrig.  
“Karkat. I don’t know that he can understand you right now. Come on, we have to get back to the meteor so we can explain what we found.”  
Dave shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Don’t we also have to finish poking around in the rest of the ship or whatever, wreck some more creepy taxidermies of long-dead trolls and solid gold statues of the Condesce?”  
Kanaya gave the agitated Karkat a pitying glance. “I think we should leave that for later. It’s not like there’ll be any prisoners left in the diplomatic block after all this time, and the crew—the rest of the crew—is all long dead.”  
Dave nodded with a quick look at the helmsman. “Got it. As long as we get out of this room, it’s like a fucking horror movie in here.”  
The teenagers tip-toed from the helmsblock, casting periodic glances back at the crackling leathery skeleton in the center of the room.

  
        Jade ran one paper-white hand over her mop of kinked curls, noting how ansty the three in front of her appeared. It was still so strange, seeing her skin this inhuman color instead of its original dark brown, much less noticing the fine white fur which covered it. And her eyes—they practically glowed now, even normally, I mean they were always pretty neon green but still. Jade turned her attention back to the team who had gone to investigate the Condesce’s old ship. “So what I’m hearing is that we have to get this troll out of there, but we can’t without Sollux and might not even be able to then. Right?”   
“Yes!” Karkat snapped. “But we have to! We can’t, we can’t just leave him there!”  
“Yeah, I get it, Karkat. But Sollux is helping search the Furthest Ring with Aradia and Terezi, he isn’t going to be back anytime soon. You know that.”  
The knight of blood looked close to tears. “Yeah, well maybe that grub-assed fuck needs to hurry up,” he muttered. Dave wrapped a hand around his in a gentle pseudo-papping motion, while Kanaya merely looked uncomfortable.  
Jade sighed. She pushed her glasses easily out of the way to look the troll straight in the eyes, in as nonthreatening a way as she could manage. “Karkat. I promise you, we will find a way to get that helmsman detached. Understood?”  
Karkat closed his eyes, clutching Dave’s hand. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay. I—I need to go do, I don’t know, something distracting.” He strode toward the golden battleship which served as their base of operations, hand still in Dave’s. Strider gave a slight smile behind his shades as he followed.   
Jade let out a breath as her gaze fell on Kanaya. “What?”  
“Um. Pardon me, Jade.” She still looked uncomfortable. “I understand that you are still less than satisfied with the current arrangement, since you want to help in the exploration, but…”  
“Yeah, I know, I’ll be way more useful here, where I can manage everything from a distance and actually be available on pesterchum, this is the best way to do it, I know!” Jade snarled.   
Kanaya’s glow brightened for a moment before fading as her expression shifted to something less pleasant. “I am aware of your agitation on this matter, that was not what I intended to discuss.”  
“Oh. Sorry.”  
“I had an… idea, while you helped Karkat to calm himself. We cannot untangle Mituna, the Helmsman, without Sollux’s aid and his return will not be for quite a long while. Assuming Rose finds somewhere for us to go for lack of a new universe which will not be destroyed upon our entrance, we will not wish to delay our departure any longer than necessary, correct? And believe me, extracting a helmsman, particularly such an ancient one, is no easy task even for one who is used to dealing with the internal organs of such a device, if it has ever been done.”  
“Sure! That’s probably true. Has nobody ever tried extracting a helmsman before?”  
“Helmsmen are decomposed and absorbed by their rigs after death,” Kanaya repeated monotonously. “They are expected to serve for life and after. In any case, we will not wish to delay our departure from this battlefield if it can possibly be avoided. Therefore it came to mind that… perhaps you might simply transplant the Helmsman into our prospitian battleship? Or at least shrink him down to something we might bring with us?”  
“Oh.” Jade grinned. “Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. I know I can at least shrink it down to something that can fit in the Yellow Yard, and maybe Sollux can figure out how to transplant him to it on the way to the outside universe.”  
A delicate jade blush crept up Kanaya’s cheeks. “I am sure you would have thought of it yourself, but I thought I might speed the process a bit. There may also be something you could do to help with the extraction, or at least numb some of the connections.” Her expression sunk into dull sobriety as she recalled the scene. “I would not wish such a fate on anyone but perhaps Her Imperious Condescension herself.”


End file.
